A burden to share? Addressing unequal climate impacts in the Least Developed Countries

Less than one-seventh of the US$5 billion needed to fund the LeastDeveloped Countries’ (LDCs’) most urgent climate change adaptation projects has been delivered by wealthy countries — a sliver of their annual spending on their own disasters and globally on fossil fuel subsidies. LDCs played almost no role in causing climate change, yet from 2010 to July 2013, their deaths fromclimate-related disasters were more than five times the global average. International pledges of climate finance to address this inequality are overall both inadequate and unmet. The burden of responding to climate change should fall on those most responsible for causing the problem, and most capable of addressing it.